A Thin Disguise by Catherine Bybee

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

A message from Neil said his crew was done and to call him before Leo tried to enter his own house.

For thirty minutes Neil walked him through the new system over the phone. Just the basics. Details would be explained on the weekend when Leo promised to be in Neil’s office to make good on his search for Olivia.

There wasn’t a care package for dinner, but there was a note on the refrigerator.

You’re a slob, Grant. Clean this or throw it out . . . but for fuck’s sake, put it out of its misery.

He pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt with the goal of tackling the mess so it was safe to go to the grocery store and refill the thing. After two months of home-cooked meals, he looked at the deli sandwich he’d grabbed on the way home with disinterest.

What he really wanted was mashed potatoes.

He dragged his laptop to the small dining table and brought his bagged dinner with him.

After a couple of bites, he logged in to Amazon and started searching for a couple of kitchen gadgets he’d used at the cabin and found useful.

He walked away to grab a bottle of water and heard his computer ping with a message.

He twisted off the cap on the water and opened his chiming chat screen.

Hello, Mr. FBI.

Leo dropped the bottle. It hit the table, bounced off the chair, and fell to the floor . . . water spilled.

He scrambled to the keyboard. Olivia?

The second he typed her name, both messages disappeared like the invisible ink function on an iPhone.

“No, no, no, no, no!” He couldn’t type fast enough. Are you there?

Yes.

The words disappeared.

He sat, ignoring the mess he’d made, or the water as it soaked into his pants. Where are you?

His words were gone in the time it took to read them.

Please don’t go.

You were not the target.

Leo’s fingers hovered over his keyboard. If he told her he knew that, would she then log off? If he argued, would she engage?

You don’t know that.He pressed send and waited.

If I learn otherwise, I will contact you.

Panic rose in his throat. Her words sounded like goodbye. Don’t go. Tell me you’re okay.

His words vanished.

How can I get ahold of you? I can help you. Let me.

No response.

He pounded his fists on the table. She needed to hear him. How could he make her listen?

We deserve a chance.

Silence.

Leo swallowed hard. I love you. He pressed send, hated that he had to type the words he’d never said to a woman who wasn’t family before.

The words faded . . .

Did she see them? Was she still there?

Loving me will only get you killed. I’m sorry.

He closed his eyes. It’s a chance I’m willing to take. He pressed send, and a screen popped up. Message undeliverable. Address not available.

“Fuck!”

Forty minutes later he sat in Neil’s headquarters with Claire typing away on his computer and Neil quizzing the conversation.

“Are you sure it was her?” Neil asked.

“She addressed me as Mr. FBI. It was a joke . . . kind of. Yes, it was her.”

“The entire conversation. From the top.”

“I asked her where she was.”

Neil shook his head.

“Right, she didn’t say. Then she said I wasn’t the target. I told her she didn’t know that.”

“Did she counter you?”

“No. She said she’d contact me if she learned otherwise,” Leo told him.

“So she doesn’t really know. But she is actively searching for the answer,” Claire said.

Leo agreed. “My thoughts exactly.”

“Then what did she say?” Neil asked.

“Nothing. I panicked. Asked if she was okay. Told her I can help her.” His breath was shaky. “I told her I loved her.”

Claire stopped typing and looked up, eyes wide.

“She didn’t respond,” Neil concluded.

“No, she did. She told me loving her would get me killed. Then she apologized and logged off.”

Neil turned away, walked to the other end of the room. “Okay, then. We have something to work with.”

Leo didn’t see it. “W-what do you mean? What do we have to work with?”

“First, she contacted you. That’s not easy for her. And she did so in less than a week.”

“That means she’s thinking about you,” Claire declared without looking up from the computer.

“And the feelings you have for her are mutual,” Neil said.

“Ahhh, look at you tapping into your warm and fuzzy side,” Claire teased Neil.

“I don’t have a warm and fuzzy side . . .”

“Wait. Stop. How did you conclude that?” Not that Leo didn’t like to hear that perspective.

“She apologized,” Neil said.

“I heard her apologize several times in Colorado.”

“That was the amnesia talking,” Claire said. “Olivia would run over your leg with a car, get out, and ask what the hell it was doing there in the first place. Saying I’m sorry isn’t in her wheelhouse.”

Neil pointed to Claire. “Which means she’s changed.” He poked Leo in the chest. “That’s all you.”

Leo’s head was short-circuiting.

Claire started singing. “Warm and fuzzy. Warm and fuzzy . . .”

“Zip it, Claire.”

She chuckled.

Neil patted Leo’s chest where his finger had poked. “Fair warning. Loving her can get you killed.”

He had already concluded that. Didn’t stop him from falling hard. He leaned against the desk where Claire was working. “I know.”

“Now, the next time she contacts you—”

“We don’t know that she will.”

Neil waited for Leo to look up to start talking again. “The next time she contacts you it will be to convince you that what you had wasn’t real. That she couldn’t care less about you or any of us.”

“To push me away.”

“Yes. The more convincing she is, the more likely there’s a threat. If she didn’t care, she wouldn’t call. So when she does reach out, try and get her on the phone. Listen for clues. Background noise, is she tired . . . is it day or night where she’s at.”

“And if I can’t decipher any of that?”

“I’ll place a recording device that activates when you turn up the volume on your phone or computer. You can deactivate by pressing it twice. Then we can pick apart the recording here,” Claire informed him.

“I thought you weren’t going to actively look for her,” Leo reminded Neil.

Neil hesitated, as if he wasn’t sure how to answer the question, and then decided. “I changed my mind.”

“And how often do you do that?” Leo asked.

“When it’s warranted.”

Claire sat back in her chair and rubbed her hands together.

“Did you find something?”

“No. Clever bitch. I really need to know how she did this.” She sighed. “I found the time the messages started and when they ended, but no data. No number, no computer ID. Nada. The disappearing ink is just brilliant. That’s some Mission Impossible shit right there.” She was clearly excited.

“Damn.”

Claire turned back with a new fever driving her. “Now the question is, Did she activate your audio and video? I would have.”

“Wait, you think she saw me, heard me when she was texting?”

Claire looked at him like he was an idiot. “Why would you have mono when you can have stereo?”

The last time Olivia stood outside the gates of Richter was the night she and Neil’s team took down Pohl. She’d convinced Neil to take her with them for their sting operation and flush out Amelia’s killer.

Olivia had every intention of putting a bullet in Pohl’s head at the first opportunity. But when she’d seen how Neil and his people worked, she couldn’t jeopardize his operation. If Pohl had ended up dead at that point . . . more questions would have been asked.

Seven years later and she sat perched in a tree with a pair of binoculars in her hand.

It hadn’t snowed yet, but the bitter cold kept the students bundled in their uniform jackets and colorful scarves. It looked as if Harry Potter had made an impact on fashion at the school.

In the short conversations she’d had with Neil in the past year, he’d informed her that the dynamics had changed at Richter. That the military-style training was there but saved for the upperclassmen. The prison-like rules had been eased, and no corporal punishment was handed down. Which meant no time in a dark cell when you acted out.

The headmistress, Lodovica, was still serving time for child endangerment, and her lover was serving a life sentence for murder.

As Olivia searched the grounds of the school for familiar faces in the staff, she found quite a few. She had snapshots of the administration; some had been there when she was a student. Professors that saw holes in the leadership and rushed to fill them.

But how many of them liked the old ways? Did they know where the students had been farmed out?

Olivia was fairly certain Neil already had this information, but asking him to find a name was like drawing a line on a map to who had shot her. At that point it would be a race to find the shooter before Neil could. Olivia had already learned that hacking into Neil’s system required her to be on the inside. And that was too risky.

Seven years ago, the information that would lead her to the shooter had been on campus, deep in the bowels of the school in a hidden room. Was it still there?

She doubted it, but needed to see for herself.

Over the course of the next few days, Olivia climbed a lot of trees, took plenty of pictures, and formulated a plan.

Getting inside was easier than it had been seven years ago. Yeah, she could have infiltrated at night, jumped the walls, dodged the cameras, hacked the system . . . but why bother?

A commercial laundry service used by the school was based twenty miles away. Obtaining one of their uniforms took up one evening, and perfecting her disguise took another.

With her car parked far away to avoid detection, and the laundry service truck on campus, she hopped over the wall to get on the school grounds. Once there, she worked her way to the backside of the dining hall and pushed open the door.

The sounds from inside instantly drove her to memories of her past.

Breakfast was in full swing. Noise from the kitchen where a small army of cooks were cleaning up one meal and prepping for the next. She shimmied past the dining staff and into the hall itself.

The smell of eggs, which never really tasted like eggs, and cooked breakfast meats made her pause. She opted for porridge most mornings when she was there, thinking the meat was too greasy and the eggs too wet or too dry.

Then there were the kids themselves. All ages from mid–primary school to college.

It was a school where rich parents tucked their children away so someone else could not only teach them but raise them. And the college students, at least in the past, were able to finish their university degree in three years instead of four.

And they were protected.

The school security kept the unwanted out and the kids in. But how had that changed?

“Excuse me.” A boy, maybe ten years old, stood in front of her with an empty tray of food.

She was standing next to the return counter, where dishes were stacked on top of each other, and flatware went into their respective bins.

Olivia spoke in German, as most of the local staff did, excused herself, and moved away.

The first sack of laundry she found sitting in the hall she grabbed and walked with as she searched the perimeter of the hall. When she worked her way to the back, where a stairwell to the lower levels once resided, she was met with a brick wall.

She followed the wall around the corner, and the space where the dumbwaiters had been was also bricked in.

What did she expect? The lower levels were where most of the shady shit at Richter took place. That didn’t mean the area wasn’t still there, it just had a different access. Unless the space was completely abandoned, including the storage room where Sasha had found all the blackmail crap.

She lowered her head and turned away from the walls.

She’d find another way.

With her bag of dirty laundry, she moved to the service area, dumped it in the bin, and grabbed a clean sack.

She started to the youth dorm, searching for floor guardians, often teachers who had computer access in their rooms.

Students rushed around, their uniforms pristine, their innocence untarnished.

Sad that the world would show them that this was the best time of their lives. The part before reality crashed in and they were exploited for their talents.

Once Olivia realized that the supervisors’ rooms were unlocked, and void of any computers, she switched her plan again.

The university dorm looked untouched.

The same color on the walls that weren’t stone or brick. The same sconce lighting that made it impossible to see but easy to sneak around at night.

Without meaning to, she found her floor, the one where she’d spent the last three years of her time at Richter, and walked to the door of her room.

“They offered me a job!” Olivia bounced on her bed, excitement in her voice.

Amelia pushed her shoulder, her smile just as huge. “I told you that you didn’t have anything to worry about. You’re like the smartest person here.”

“I’m so ready to get out of this place. I’m going to be able to travel and see the world. I’m going to sleep with exotic men and wear fancy clothes.” She dropped her head on her pillow with visions of evening gowns and champagne dangling from her fingertips.

“Which company hired you?” Amelia asked.

That was the best part. “I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you,” she said, laughing. She sat up almost as quickly as she’d flopped down. Her voice was nothing but a whisper. “Super hush- hush. It’s some kind of secret society. I think it’s run by the UN.”

“I bet my dad knows about it,” Amelia said.

“Don’t say a thing to your dad. I shouldn’t have even told you. I was told that if anyone found out I was working for them, I’d lose my job instantly.”

Amelia frowned. “That’s weird.”

Olivia shrugged. “I don’t care. It’s my ticket out of this place. The money I earned with the extra language classes still won’t get me a flat in Berlin for longer than a year. Now I can put that money away and add to it. I get to be an honest-to-goodness spy. Can you believe it?” She grasped Amelia’s hands, and they both squealed.

“This calls for a celebration.”

“I know where the key is to Charlie’s locker.”

Olivia placed her hand on the door as her memory faded.

The door opened and she stepped back. A young man, maybe twenty, seemed startled by her presence. “What are you doing up here?” he asked in German.

“I’m new,” she told him in German as she lifted the empty sack. “Was told to gather the dirty.”

The kid rolled his eyes. “We don’t leave them up here, they’re down the chute.” He closed the door behind him and brushed by.

“That’s no way to talk to your elders, Kellen.”

The reprimand was in English and a very familiar voice.

Kellen turned back to her, placed a smile on his face that hadn’t been there before. “My apologies, ma’am.”

The kid walked away, leaving Olivia with Checkpoint Charlie standing three feet away.